Experts trial dogs and robots as disease detectors

In these pandemic times, disease detection technology is crucial to a country’s ability to control an outbreak. Today in our Sunday special report, we turn to an unconventional technology for sniffing out disease: dogs! Researchers are exploring the potential of detection dogs, finding them to be useful in the screening of diseases like COVID and even cancer. Researchers are also experimenting with robotic systems that can act in a similar way to detection dogs. These robots and detection dogs open up new possibilities for countries seeking to screen for contagion and protect their borders.

Its small body darting from suitcase to suitcase, the dog sits in place once it detects a suspicious odor. This was taken in 2018 when African swine fever was at its height. Quarantine efforts at the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport relied on this beagle’s keen sense of smell. One after another, packages containing smuggled pork were seized by authorities.

Tan Ta-lun
Taiwan Veterinary Medical Association
A dog’s olfactory cells are very different from those of humans. Humans have roughly 5 million of these cells, while dogs have around 200 million of them. The things a dog is able to smell are much greater in number than those humans can smell.

In 2020, humans are pinning even greater hopes on this ability of dogs. COVID-19 has claimed over 2 million lives worldwide, and over 90 million have become infected, causing countries to everywhere to shut their borders and to subject the few visitors allowed in to rigorous testing. In northern Europe, Finland is bravely entrusting part of this task to a group of four-legged personnel, hoping their keen senses will help detect arriving travelers that are carrying the virus that causes the disease.

Nose Academy, Finland
First we have people enter this small room, where they swab themselves to collect a sample, which is deposited into a container. I place that next to a container with a contrasting sample, and ask the dog if it detects anything in the samples.

Finland’s use of scent detection in place of throat-swab tests defies the imagination, leading some to ask whether a disease really produces a scent.

Shih Chung-hung
Physician
Cirrhosis patients produce a smell that, if you stand next to them, you will detect as the scent of ammonia. Sometimes patients with pneumonia will produce gases that you will detect as many strange smells. Sometimes those smells are from Pseudomonas aeruginosa, but not everyone can smell it.

Chiang Kun-chun
Min Sheng General Hospital
Normal cells and cancerous cells are different, and they travel a different metabolic path in the body. Dogs have a sense of smell several magnitudes greater than that of people, and when they smell a person’s body, they may be able to detect the presence of cancerous cells. This is because when the byproducts of metabolism are produced, if they are able to volatilize, when they volatilize they will produce a scent. So the question is, can we use this ability of dogs to smell cancer cells, to detect whether a person has cancer?

Aside from cancer, researchers have discovered that dogs can detect diabetes, malaria, Parkinson’s and other diseases, and they do this with a level of accuracy greater than 60%. In recent years, medical organizations in Taiwan have been researching the use of dogs to detect cancer. Breast cancer specialist Chiang Kun-chun hopes that dogs can be used to detect patients with early-stage breast cancer.

To train dogs to recognize the smell of breast cancer, Chiang plans to collect urine samples from 25 breast cancer patients and 25 healthy women. Once collected, the samples will be sent to a laboratory, and training will begin.

There is the question of what dogs are most suitable for use in cancer detection.

Chiang Hsiao-ya
Dog trainer
The main point, if I had to choose, would be how active the dog is. The more active, the better. The more unruly they are, the more I like them. Unruly dogs tend to be more curious. If a dog is too quiet, all they can do is wait for someone to give them commands – they will be harder to train as a detection dog.

As the camera approaches him, he explodes with excitement. This is Chuan Chuan. He is a detection dog specialized in detecting bladder cancer. To test his ability, we have invited a trainer, who has brought seven urine samples including one from a cancer patient, to conduct a blind test.

The trainer takes 3 milliliter samples of urine and deposits them onto cotton swabs. Of the seven petri dishes, only one contains a sample from the cancer patient. These samples are then brought to the lab, where they are placed into special receptacles designed for detection dogs to use. After the preparations are complete, the test begins.
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